The increased use of technology and computers has generated a corresponding increase in digital data. This ever-increasing digital data requires a corresponding ever-increasing amount of storage space.
The need for storage space for digital data has been fueled through many changes in society. For example, Home computer users' increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, industry also requires increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there has been an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. Furthermore, there has been a demand to digitize the storage of once paper files in an attempt to decrease the overhead cost of this paper generation and storage.
The need for increased storage space has been partly satisfied by simply increasing the number of storage devices used and by using storage devices with more capacity. For example, where computers once had hard drives capable of storing mere megabytes of data, many computers now come standard with a terabyte of storage capacity. Using more storage devices, and storage devices with increased capacity has somewhat alleviated storage needs, however, these methods do not help those who have reached storage capacity limits on their existing hardware.
Storing the data in a more efficient manner is one way to provide increased storage capacity on existing hardware. Compression is one such method of storing data in a more efficient manner. Compression is the process of representing information using fewer bits than the information's original representation. Compression is advantageous because it simply provides users with more storage space without having to add or upgrade additional storage devices. Previously stored data is simply stored in a more efficient manner, leaving additional free space on existing storage hardware.
While there is a need for methods to efficiently store digital data, there is also a need for methods of efficiently moving this same data. Moving data around requires extensive infrastructure. The infrastructure must correspondingly be increased and buttressed as it is being used to transfer more data. Again, rather than simply adding more infrastructure, or modifying existing infrastructure, methods can be used to transfer the same amount of information but in a more efficient manner. Again compression can be used to compress the data before the data is transferred.
While compression can be used to more efficiently store and transfer data, compression methods can be time and processor intensive.